How to export cages from 3ds Max to Substance Painter

arkaneXXI

Hi. I have a low poly model in an .obj file composed by different pieces (not a single mesh). But I have problems baking the normal map of the cilindrical shapes:


I have read this can be solved using cages. The problem is... can I import many cages in Substance Painter for every element with this problem? Or should I make a make a cage that covers all the elements? If that's the case... should I attach all the pieces into a single object to make a single cage for all the pieces or should I make a cage for every piece and combine them if there is a way to do that?

Thanks in advance.

rollin

First of all you try to bake a cylinder onto a lowpoly which is just too low. So your result is imo perfectly fine.
If your problem is that the baked cylinder is not touching the edge of the lowpoly (where the red circle is) then your high and lowpoly do not match at this edge.
If you want to deal with cages you should have one cage per (lowpoly) model / substance painter object. How you attach them is up to you but they shouldn't overlap

arkaneXXI

rollin said:

First of all you try to bake a cylinder onto a lowpoly which is just too low. So your result is imo perfectly fine.
If your problem is that the baked cylinder is not touching the edge of the lowpoly (where the red circle is) then your high and lowpoly do not match at this edge.
If you want to deal with cages you should have one cage per (lowpoly) model / substance painter object. How you attach them is up to you but they shouldn't overlap

Yes, I didn't notice that the high poly model got smaller when I have applied the Turbo Smooth modifier to generate it. The result got much better just adjusting the size. I thought that I needed a Cage because this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnuK6xyi-qY

Anyway, I still have another problem that I got lot of times in Substance Painter and never could solve it (except:


The AO always look horrible in the intersections between two different meshes.